Thursday, March 31, 2016

You Plinker!

Some say that a dinner of roast quail and venison sausage, rifle to table, helps you shoot better the next day at the range. I drove out into the Texan countryside with my philisophical pal, GWB, to find out.

We took along a couple of scoped Ruger .22s, an American and a 10/22, representing the bolt and the semi side of the rimfire world. And a couple of pistols, a Sig and a Glock, chambered for 9mm and .45. But what about the quail and venison theory of marksmanship, how did that stand up, in the real world?

If a metal kettle, a plastic Folgers container, steel plates and turkey, at 75 and 100 yards, are anything to go by, the theory holds true. Down went the opposition, with a vengeance. I claim the best pistol shot of the day, hitting the kettle at 75 yards with the Glock. Sorry, kettle, you lose. I never much liked you anyway.

Shoot over, GWB wanted to check out the land behind the range for what he calls "native Texan grasses." That excitement over, I spotted a piece of metal, shining in the hot spring sun. "Look at that, you see it, glinting in the sun?" I asked my Wittgensteinian ally, "Maybe it's a piece of UFO debris. Let's have a look."

It wasn't a bit of space junk, annoyingly, just an old air conditioner that someone had dumped. And as I reflected on the higher implications of that, a long rattlesnake uncoiled silently from beneath the rusting metal and made its way, gliding and deadly, into a nearby pipe. Moral of the story?

Quail and venison help you shoot. This is now settled science. Also, don't be a dimwit when you go for a nature ramble in Texas, it's not Devon, or the Cotswolds. Take a gun, you might need it, and be careful poking around in space junk, who knows what killers might lurk within.